The Power of Love (2 page)

Eric glanced around quickly with pale, unfocused eyes, then turned to her. His face seemed almost as distorted as it had underwater. “I was only playing,” he said.

Someone called him from the opposite end of the pool. People were starting to move inside. He got up slowly and headed in the direction of the pool house. Ivy stayed by the side of the pool, taking deep breaths. She knew she had to stay in the pool. She had to wait till she was breathing normally again, then swim some laps. Tristan had led her past her fear. She was not going to let Eric take her back again. She began to swim.

When Ivy reached the end of the pool and made her turn for another lap, Beth reached down and grabbed her ankle. Ivy looked over her shoulder and saw Beth teetering on the edge of the pool, her large-brimmed hat coming down over her eyes. Will moved quickly to anchor Beth from behind.

“What’s up?” Ivy asked, smiling at Beth, glancing quickly, self-consciously at Will.

“Everyone’s going inside to watch videos,” Beth told her enthusiastically, “some that were taken at school this year, and after school at basketball games and—” Beth stopped.

“Swim meets,” Ivy finished the sentence for her. Perhaps she could see, one more time, Tristan swimming the butterfly.

Beth took a step back from the edge of the pool and turned to Will. “I’m going to stay outside for a while.”

“Don’t stay outside for me, Beth,” Ivy said. “I—”

“Listen,” Beth interrupted her, “with everybody inside, I can finally bare this beautiful white bod and not worry about giving them all snow blindness.”

Will laughed softly and said something intended for Beth’s ears only.

Will was a sweet guy, but Ivy wouldn’t have blamed him if he were furious at her, not after the scene she had made the previous Saturday night. He had drawn pictures of angels—one of Tristan as an angel with his arms wrapped around Ivy. She had ripped it to shreds.

“Go in and watch the videos, Beth,” Ivy said firmly. “I just want to swim a little.”

Will leaned forward then. “You shouldn’t swim by yourself, Ivy.”

“That’s what Tristan used to say.”

In response, Will gazed back at her with eyes that spoke a language of their own. They were brown pools, deep enough to drown in, Ivy thought. Tristan’s had been hazel, and yet there was something similar about his eyes and Will’s, something that drew her to him.

She turned away quickly, then caught her breath. With a soft flash of colorful wings, a butterfly landed on her shoulder.

“A flyer,” Beth said. Perhaps because they were all thinking about Tristan, Beth had used the word for a swimmer who did the butterfly.

Ivy tried to brush off the insect. Its wings fluttered, but it surprised her by staying put.

“It’s mistaken you for a flower,” Will said, smiling, his eyes full of light.

“Maybe,” Ivy replied, anxious to get away from him and Beth. Pushing off from the side of the pool, she began to swim.

She did lap after lap, and when she was finally tired, she swam to the middle of the pool and flipped over to float.

“It’s such a great feeling, Ivy. Do you know what it’s like to float on a lake, a circle of trees around you, a big blue bowl of sky above you? You’re lying on top of the water, sun sparkling at the tips of your fingers and toes.”

The memory of Tristan’s voice was so strong it was as if she heard it now. It seemed impossible that the big blue bowl of sky stayed up; it should have shattered like the car windshield the night of the accident, but there it was.

She remembered lying back in the water, feeling his arm beneath her as he taught her to float. “Easy now, don’t fight it,” he’d said.

She didn’t fight it. She closed her eyes and imagined being in the center of a lake. When she had opened her eyes, he was looking down on her, his face like the sun, warming her.

“I’m floating,” Ivy had whispered, and whispered it now.

“You’re floating.”

“Floating.” They had read it off each other’s lips, and for a moment now she felt as if he were bending over her still—“Floating”—their lips close, so close …

“Give ’em back!”

Ivy pulled her head up quickly, and her feet sank straight down beneath her. She quickly wiped the water out of her eyes.

The door of the pool house had been flung open, and Gregory was racing across the lawn, carrying a small piece of dark clothing in his hands. Odd globs of white, foamy stuff flew from his hair. Eric came streaking after him, one hand clutching Beth’s hat—his only bit of cover—and the other wielding a long kitchen knife. “You’re dead meat, Gregory.”

“Come get them.” Gregory egged him on, holding up Eric’s trunks. “Come on. Give it your best shot.”

“I’m going to—”

“Sure, sure,” Gregory baited.

Eric suddenly stopped running. “I’ll get you, Gregory,” he warned. “When you least expect it.”

2

Lacey sat back in the café chair, smiling at Tristan and looking very pleased with herself. Apparently she had forgiven him for dragging her away from the pool house free-for-all at Eric’s party. Now she hooked her thumbs together and flapped her hands, rippling her fingers like wings. “You have to admit, landing that butterfly on Ivy was a nice touch.”

Tristan eyed her shimmering fingers and long nails, and responded with something between a grimace and a smile. When he had first met Lacey Lovitt, he had thought the purple nails and the odd magenta rinse on her dark, spiked hair were a result of her hanging around in this world for two years—a long period of time for their kind of angel. But actually it was the way she liked her nails and hair to look, the way she had colored them after her last Hollywood film and before her plane went down.

“The butterfly was nice,” he began, “but—”

“You’re wondering how I did it,” she interrupted. “I guess I’ll have to teach you about using force fields.” She eyed the dessert tray as it went by—not that she, or he, could actually eat.

“But—” Tristan said again.

“You’re wondering how I knew about the butterfly,” she said. “I told you, I read all about Stonehill High’s hero, the great swimmer, Tristan Carruthers, in the local paper. I knew the butterfly was your stroke. I knew it would make Ivy think of you.”

“What I was wondering was this: Couldn’t you have left the pies alone?”

Her eyes slid over to the dessert tray again.

“Don’t even think about it,” he said.

There were only a handful of customers sitting at the town’s outdoor café at four-thirty in the afternoon, but he knew Lacey could create chaos with very little. Two pies and some whipped cream—that’s all it had taken earlier at Eric’s. “I mean, isn’t that kind of stunt a little old, Lacey? It was old when the Three Stooges did it.”

“Oh, lighten up, Dumps,” she replied. “Everyone at the party enjoyed it. Okay, okay,” she said,
“some
people enjoyed it, and a few, like Suzanne, got fussy about their hair. But I had a good time.”

Tristan shook his head. Lacey had been lightning-quick, moving around the pool house, invisibly picking fights. She had obviously enjoyed yanking at Gregory’s swimming trunks whenever Eric was close by. “Now I know why you never complete your mission,” Tristan said.

“Well,
excu-u-use
me!
Please
remind me of that next time you beg me to come with you and help you reach Ivy.” She stood up abruptly and stomped out of the café. Tristan was used to her dramatics and followed her slowly onto Main Street.

“You’ve got nerve, Tristan, criticizing my little bit of fun. Where were you when Ivy started making faces like a goldfish down in the deep end of the pool? Who took care of Eric?”

“You did,” he said, “and you know where I was.”

“All tangled up inside of Will.”

Tristan nodded. The truth was embarrassing.

He and Lacey moved silendy down the brick sidewalk, passing a row of shops with bright striped awnings. Windows full of antiques and dried-flower arrangements, art books and decorator wallpaper showed off the taste of the wealthy Connecticut town. Tristan still walked as if he were alive and solid, moving out of the way of shoppers. Lacey went straight through them.

“I must be doing something wrong,” Tristan said at last. “One moment I’m inside Will, so much a part of him that when he looks at Ivy, I do, too. It’s like he feels what I feel for her. Then all of a sudden he pulls back.”

Lacey had stopped to look in the window of a dress shop.

“I must be pushing too hard,” Tristan continued. “I need Will to speak for me. But I think he’s discovered me prowling around in his mind, and now he’s afraid of me.”

“Or maybe,” said Lacey, “he’s afraid of
her.”

“Of Ivy?”

“Of his feelings for her.”

“My
feelings for her!” Tristan said quickly.

Lacey turned to look at him, her head cocked. Tristan feigned a sudden interest in an ugly black sequined dress hanging in the window. He couldn’t see a reflection of Lacey’s face in the glass, any more than he could see his own. Just a shimmer of gold and wisps of soft color shone against the window; he guessed that it was what a believer would see when looking at them.

“Why?” Lacey asked. “I want to know
why
you assume that you’re the only guy in the world in love with—”

Tristan cut in. “I entered Will, and since he’s a good radio, he started to feel my feelings and think my thoughts. That’s how it works, right?”

“Didn’t it ever occur to you that the reason it was so easy for an amateur like you to enter Will was because he was
already
feeling your feelings and thinking your thoughts, at least when it comes to Ivy?”

It had, but Tristan had done his best to squelch the idea.

“I got inside Beth’s mind, too,” he reminded her.

The first time Lacey had seen Beth, she had told Tristan that Ivy’s friend would be a natural “radio,” someone who could transmit messages from a different side of life. Just as Tristan had coaxed Will into drawing angels in an effort to comfort Ivy, he had gotten Beth to do some automatic writing, though it was so jumbled that no one had been able to make sense of it.

“You got inside, but it was tougher for you,” Lacey pointed out. “You bumbled a lot, remember? And besides, Beth also loves Ivy.”

She turned back to the window. “A killer dress,” she said, then walked on. “What I really want to know is what everyone sees in this chick.”

“It was nice of you to save a chick you think so little of,” Tristan remarked dryly.

They passed the photo lab where Will worked and stopped in front of Celentano’s, the pizza parlor where Will had drawn the angels on the paper tablecloth.

“I didn’t save her,” Lacey replied. “Eric was just playing—but you’d better figure out what kind of game it is. I’ve known some real creeps in my life, and I’ve got to say, he’s not someone
I’d
like to party with.”

Tristan nodded. He had so much to learn. After traveling back in time through his own mind, he was sure that someone had cut the brake line the night his car had slammed head-on into a deer. But he had no idea why.

“Do you think Eric did it?” he asked.

“Went after your brakes?” Lacey twisted a spike of purple hair around a daggerlike fingernail. “That’s a leap, from being a bully in the deep end to committing murder. What did he have against you and Ivy?”

Tristan lifted his hands, then let them drop. “I don’t know.”

“What did anybody have against you or her? They could have been after just one of you. If it was you they wanted to get rid of, she’s safe now.”

“If she’s safe, why was I brought back on a mission?”

“To annoy me,” Lacey said. “Obviously you’re some kind of penance for me. Oh, cheer up, Dumps! Maybe you just got your mission wrong.”

She slipped through the door of Celentano’s without opening it, then reached up mischievously and jangled the three little bells over it. Two guys in T-shirts and grass-stained cutoffs stared at the door. Tristan knew she had materialized the tips of her fingers—a trick that he had just recently mastered—and managed to pull on the string of bells. She jangled them a second time, and the guys, unable to see either Lacey or Tristan, looked at each other.

Tristan smiled, then said, “You’re going to scare away business.”

Lacey climbed up on the counter next to Dennis Celentano. He had rolled out some dough and was expertly flipping it above his head—until it didn’t come back down. It hung like a wet washrag in midair. Dennis gaped up at it, then leaned from one side to the other, trying to figure out what was holding up the dough.

Tristan guessed that the dough was going to be one more pie in the face. “Be nice, Lacey.”

She dropped the dough neatly on the counter. They left Dennis and his customers to look at one another and wonder. “With you around,” she complained to Tristan, “I’ll be earning gold stars and finishing up my mission in no time.”

Tristan doubted it. “Maybe you can earn some more stars by helping me with mine,” he told her. “Didn’t you tell me there was a way to travel back in time through somebody else’s mind? Didn’t you say I could search the past through someone else’s memory?”

“No, I said
I
could,” she replied.

“Teach me.”

She shook her head.

“Come on, Lacey.”

“Nope.”

They were at the end of the street now, standing in front of an old church with a low stone wall around it. Lacey hopped up on the wall and began to walk it.

“It’s too risky, Tristan. And I don’t think it’s going to help you any. Even if you could get inside a mind like Eric’s, what do you think you’d find? That guy’s circuits have been curled and fried. It could be—to use one of his terms—a very bad trip for you.”

“Teach me,” he persisted. “If I’m going to learn who cut the brakes, I’m going to have to go back to that night in the mind of everybody who might have seen something, including Ivy.”

“Ivy! You’ll
never
get in! That chick’s got you and everyone else closed out cold.”

Lacey paused, waiting till she had Tristan’s full attention, then lifted up one leg as if she were doing a balance-beam routine. She’s never lost her appetite for an audience, Tristan thought.

“I tried Ivy myself at the pool party this afternoon,” Lacey went on, “I can’t imagine how, even when you were alive, you and that chick ever got it on.”

“Do you think you could come up with a way to give advice without making sarcastic remarks about ‘that chick’?”

“Sure,” she answered agreeably, and started walking the wall again. “But it wouldn’t be half as much fun.”

“I’ll try Philip again,” Tristan said, more to himself than to her. “And Gregory—”

“Now,
Gregory’s
a tough nut to crack. Do you trust him? Stupid question,” she said before he could answer. “You don’t trust anyone who’s got eyes for Ivy.”

Tristan’s head bobbed up. “Gregory’s dating Suzanne.”

She laughed down at him. “You’re so naive! It’s refreshing, for a jock-hunk type like you, but it’s kind of pitiful, too.”

“Teach me,” he said for the third time, then reached up and caught her hand. Since angel hands did not pass through each other, he could hold on tight. “I’m worried about her, Lacey, I’m really worried.”

She looked down at him.

“Help me.”

Lacey stared at her long fingers caught by his.

She pulled her hand away very slowly, then reached down and patted him on the head. He hated the way she could patronize him, and he didn’t like begging, but she knew things that would take a long time for him to learn on his own.

“Okay, okay. But listen up, because I’m only telling you once.”

He nodded.

“First you have to find the hook. You have to find something that the person saw or did that night. The best kind of hook is an object or action that is connected with that night only, but avoid anything that might threaten your host. You don’t want to set off alarm bells in his head.”

She stepped carefully along a crumbling section of wall. “It’s sort of like doing a word search on a library computer. If you pick a term that’s too general, you’ll call up all kinds of junk you don’t want.”

“Easy enough,” he said with confidence.

“Uh-huh,” she said, and rolled her eyes. “Once you’ve got your hook, you enter the person, like you’ve already done with Will and Beth, only you have to be more careful than ever. If your host feels you prowling around, if something feels strange to him, he’s going to be on guard. Then he’ll be too alert to let his mind wander back through memories.”

“They’ll never guess I’m there.”

“Uh-huh,”
she said again. “Be patient. Creep.” She crept along the wall in slow motion. “And slowly bring into focus whatever image you’re using for the hook. Remember to see it the same way that your host would.”

“Of course.” It was simple. He probably could have figured it out on his own, he thought. “And then?”

She jumped down from the wall. “That’s it.”

“That’s it?”

“That’s when the fun begins.”

“But tell me what it’s like, Lacey, so I know what to expect. Tell me how it feels.”

“Oh, I think you probably could figure it out on your own.”

He stopped short. “Can you read minds?”

She turned to look him straight in the eye. “No, but I’m pretty good at reading faces. And yours is like a large-print book.”

He glanced away.

“You need me, Tristan, but you don’t take me seriously. I met a lot of people like you when I was alive.”

He didn’t know what to say.

“Listen, I’ve got my own mission to work on. It’s time I start poking around New York City, going back to the beginning and figuring out what I’m supposed to be figuring out. Thanks to you, I’m already late for the train.”

“Sorry,” he said.

“I know you can’t help it. Listen, if you should finish up your mission before I get back, can I have your grave? I mean, me not having one, unless you count my airplane seat at the bottom of the Atlantic, and you wouldn’t be needing one after that—”